


the city that loves you

by ladymemebeth



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1980s, Alternate Universe - Muggle, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Angst, Greenwich Village, M/M, New York City, Pregnancy, Recreational Drug Use, Weddings, being an adult is hard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-08-27 11:46:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16701928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymemebeth/pseuds/ladymemebeth
Summary: two years after graduating from hogwarts prep in upstate new york, sirius black and remus lupin are living together in greenwich village, james potter and lily evans are getting married, and growing up is hard for everyone. set in early spring, 1980.WIP — sirius/james (one-sided), remus/sirius





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i posted a version of this a while ago before i had really planned out the rest of the story and now i've finally got a hold on the plot so i've edited what i had and reuploaded it. it doesn't exactly have a happy ending as of right now, but perhaps a hopeful one?

It has been four years since the United States Bicentennial was celebrated throughout New York, leaving over fifteen-hundred tons of garbage in the streets of lower Manhattan alone. It has been five years since President Ford told the city to drop dead, at least according to the _Daily News_. It has been six years since Philippe Petit walked back and forth between the new World Trade Center towers eight times, suspended by a steel cable a hundred stories above the ground in the morning fog. It has been seven years since CBGB opened, eight years since the new subway map was introduced, and nine years since James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew’s lives intersected in a dorm room belonging to a private preparatory school upstate.

It has been two years since the four of them graduated from that same school and moved south, nestling in the crook of New York’s arm. Sirius feels he has lived a hundred different lives between now and then. Being an adult is an endless procession of disappointment, he’s decided, though he appreciates the freedom being out of school affords him. 

“Being an adult is an endless procession of disappointment,” he says to one of the bartenders at the club where he works, as they stand in the alley outside, smoking cigarettes. They huddle together under the overhang of the building next to the dumpster, but the wind ends up blowing the rain towards them anyway.

“Okay, Sirius,” she replies, unimpressed by his philosophizing. She fiddles with the lighter in her hand, flicks it open and shut with a satisfying metallic _clink_.

“No, really,” he continues. “I thought that there would be more, you know?”

“Did you think it would be more fun?” 

“Well, yeah, I guess.” Sirius throws the cigarette butt onto the wet ground. 

“I don’t know what to tell you, man,” the bartender — Sylvia — says as she exhales an impressive cloud of smoke. “That’s just how it is sometimes.” She stubs out her cigarette on the side of the dumpster and wipes her hands on the black apron tied around her waist before heading back inside the bar through the kitchen. Sirius watches the door swing shut behind her. 

—

New York is at its ugliest in the rain, he reflects as he stalks home from work. Maybe second-ugliest only to snow, when the garbage piles up in the slush on the street corners and you can always tell exactly where the drunkards pissed the night before. At least with rain things get washed away, he amends. A hood drawn over his head, hands crammed in his jacket pockets, Sirius tries to make himself take up as little space as possible on the sidewalk, as if he could slip in between the raindrops if only he were small enough. He doesn’t carry an umbrella — why bother, when the harsh wind would immediately force it inside out? The sidewalks are always littered with the carcasses of umbrellas during prolonged rainstorms; people leave them where they fall. He’s resigned to being soaked, anyway.

He takes the steps up to the front door of his apartment two at a time. A fourth-floor walk-up had seemed manageable two years ago, and he supposes that it could be worse. Still, there are days when he gets home and seriously considers going to sleep under the stairwell, just inside the entryway. It wouldn’t be any less comfortable than the naked mattress he usually sleeps on, the tired material only providing the barest cushion between his body and the floor. He listens to the crackle of his neighbor’s television, which he can hear plain as day through the thin walls — it sounds like re-runs of _The Love Boat_ or some other stupid shit like that. He wonders if that, too, is another part of adulthood: suddenly finding yourself entertained by the most insipid drivel. His neighbor barks out a guffaw alongside the canned laughter, and Sirius sighs in disgust.

He tries not to make too much of a racket as he struggles with the front door but he’s too tired to be much aware of his own body. Besides, it always takes about an hour to get past the front door because of the half-dozen locks Remus has illegally installed. Sirius suspects the safety measure is twofold: the amount of noise the different locks make would be just as much of a deterrent to any potential intruder as the locks themselves. Not that there’s anything inside worth stealing. He clatters into the entryway and kicks off his boots, which thud satisfyingly on the floor, and shrugs off his jacket. He leaves the sodden clothing in a heap by the doorway, something that Remus will surely complain about later. The apartment smells like pot poorly disguised by incense, a familiar aroma for which Sirius will always carry affection.

“Hey,” he calls quietly. Remus’ door is halfway open, and Sirius can make out the shape of him lying shirtless on his mattress in the dark, an arm slung over his eyes. Soft music leaks out into the hall. He pauses for a minute, listening, before he recognizes Roberta Flack’s voice. He privately wonders to himself about Remus’ taste in music and his penchant for melodramatic songstresses, the more mournful the better. Remus likes music that sounds like it should be played in church rather than a club. 

“Hey,” he says again, opening the door. He kneels down and turns on the lamp, which, like the mattress, is on the floor. Remus groans at the intrusive light.

“S’late, Sirius,” Remus says irritably. “M’sleeping.”

Sirius moves the smoldering ashtray off the mattress and sets it near the lamp before sitting down next to Remus, who bends his knees to make room. Remus is always pliant when he’s stoned, bones gone to mush under his skin. In this unflattering light, he looks terrifyingly thin, but don’t they all? And hasn’t Remus always been this way, gangly and grinning, with long slender limbs? Sirius wants to believe that things are still the same, so this is what he tells himself, that nothing has changed except for their location and the length of their hair. Remus has always been thin; when James and Sirius were all muscle and Pete was still all baby fat, Remus was just bone, ghostly, a specter of himself even on his best days. Sirius feels a stab of memory, of creeping up on Remus at some point during the mid-morning in their sophomore year of high school. They had splashed generous amounts of water on the sleeping boy until he woke up, the confusion on his face shifting into rage as he leapt from the bed to tackle Sirius, James, and Peter to the floor of their dormitory. Remus may be skinny, but his sharp edges proved to be useful in physical fights. 

Remus sits up and rests his knobby elbows on his even-knobbier knees. “How was work?” he asks. 

Sirius shrugs. “It was work. No bar fights to break up this time.” This is a running joke that Remus never seems to get tired of, because Sirius is a dishwasher, not a bouncer or even a bartender. When there are bar fights, he hardly ever hears about them until they’re long finished. “I’ve told you about that girl who works there, right? Sylvia?”

“I believe you once referred to her as ‘Kate Bush if she were Latin,’ so yes, you’ve told me about her.” Remus wipes his red-rimmed eyes with the heel of his hand, yawns. “Are you in love with her?”

Sirius screws up his face. “Very funny. No, I’m not in love with her, asshole.” He chews at a loose bit of skin on the side of his thumb. “She’s in a band, though. She invited me to go to one of her shows sometime.”

“Maybe _she’s_ in love with _you_ ,” says Remus as he lies back down on the mattress. “Don’t bite your nails,” he adds, half-mumbling into his pillow.

“Thank you, Mother,” Sirius replies sarcastically. “Whatever, man. You’re the most boring stoner I’ve ever known.”

Remus grunts in response. Sirius pokes at the soft pale skin of his exposed belly, and Remus just groans and rolls over, curled away from him. Defeated, Sirius stands to go.

“Oh, wait, Sirius — ” Remus calls when Sirius has one foot out of the doorway. “I meant to tell you that James called while you were at work.”

Sirius doesn’t turn around, though Remus is probably too far gone to notice the color he can feel rising in his own cheeks. He hasn’t seen James in what feels like forever — he knows it’s only been a week or so, but it _feels_ like ages. He thought time was supposed to pass more quickly as an adult, especially now that he’s not always locked within the dull confines of a classroom, but he finds that the days drag painfully like some kind of limping creature. “What’d he want?” Sirius asks, casual, cool.

“Dunno. Just wanted to see you. You should call him back in the morning.”

Sirius feels the long-familiar cold crawl of shame at the nape of his neck. He tugs at the collar of his work shirt as he replies, “Okay. Thanks for letting me know. ‘Night, Remus.”

He watches himself in the mirror as he brushes his teeth before bed. Sometimes Sirius catches his reflection in a storefront window while walking through the Village and has to fight the urge to stare it down the way he would some ancient enemy, recognizable in all the wrong ways. His back hurts. He flops onto his bed and thinks about James. Sirius used to barely go an hour without seeing him; now the time without James has begun to outnumber the time with him. Sirius isn’t sure how to feel about that, isn’t sure how to communicate his fears to anyone, least of all James himself. He doesn’t think Remus feels the same way — how could he, when it had always been jamesandsirius even when they were scheming or horsing around or just hanging out as a friend group. He wonders if Remus ever felt left out during their time at school. It hadn’t even occurred to him. _Come back_ , Sirius sometimes thinks, though it’s less directed towards James and more towards time itself, as if he could reach through the chronology of his life and reroute the passage of time.

There have been other boys — he isn’t that pathetic — but they had all been eclipsed by the bone-deep comfort that Sirius feels when he is with James: that never-thinking, all-knowing familiarity almost like muscle memory. A love that is so essential to one’s being that it could almost go unnoticed, except that it never does. Sirius notices, can’t help but notice, is full to the brim and sick to death with noticing. It makes him tired, exhausted after this many years. Maybe he _is_ that pathetic. He clenches and unclenches his jaw. He’d bitten his tongue in his sleep the night before and spent most of the day worrying the sore against his back molars, just for something to do in the brief dishless moments at work. 

But James had called. He had gone through his address book (because he could never remember anything numerical for the life of him) and called their apartment and asked for Sirius when Remus picked up, probably jolting him out of a nap. He wanted to see him, because of course, that’s what friends do: they see each other. Sirius sees Remus every day, and sometimes he wonders — well, he wonders about a lot of things, these days. Maybe that’s just another part of being an adult, another sad aspect that he couldn’t have anticipated back at boarding school, where he assumed that life post-graduation would be full of _doing_ rather than just thinking. How dumb, he thinks, rolling over on the flimsy mattress to stare at the neon light flickering in the window of the nightclub across the street. He stares at the neon for so long that when he finally closes his eyes, the ghost of its gaudy red announcement remains in his vision as he falls asleep. 

***

On Thursday Sirius goes to meet James and Remus goes to class. The week-long rainstorms have finally let up, but Remus still rushes through Washington Square Park to the library, afraid the gloomy sky will suddenly crack open and release yet another deluge. Normally he likes to stroll — at least while it’s still light out — and observe the various shifting scenes of the park’s regular inhabitants, read the graffiti scrawled on the arch at the park’s entrance, dodge the cool spray of the fountain at its center during the summer. When he first moved to the city, Remus had grown used to near-nightly phone calls from his parents who insisted on verifying his living status after they caught wind of whatever horrible event had occurred across the five boroughs. Eventually he forced them to lay off, promising that he would be the first one to call (collect, of course) if anything atrocious happened. He didn’t call them after James got mugged in broad daylight on his way to pick up his girlfriend, Lily, from class uptown, or after he got drunker than he’d ever been and wouldn’t stop vomiting so that the toilet backed up and Sirius had to run to their friend Dorcas’ apartment to beg for help with the plumbing in the middle of the night. He didn’t phone his parents to let them know about Sirius coming home with a black eye after “taking a walk” in the park one night and Remus bringing him a bag of frozen peas and pretending he didn’t know where he was, what he was doing, pretending the ache in his stomach doesn’t make him ill.He doesn’t call to discuss Peter’s intensifying estrangement from the group or his own growing loneliness because even if the population of New York City had declined 10% in the past decade, there are still a hell of a lot more people here than upstate and it doesn’t make sense for him to feel this way all the time. 

Now he only calls his parents to tell them the good news, when there’s good news: a particularly excellent mark on an exam, or a song he heard on the radio that he thinks his mothermight like. Sometimes he wonders if he’s cut out for this place, these so-called mean streets. Sometimes he sincerely doubts it.

Remus spends a good amount of time in this particular library — it’s an ugly building, tall with a stark brick façade, out of place in the gentler skyline of Greenwich Village, but it’s new and already teeming with books so Remus likes it. He likes to sit among the shelves on the north side of the library so he can see out over the park. 

It’s nearly dark by the time he finishes his work for the day. Remus carefully rearranges his books and papers into his knapsack, dislodging his pack of cigarettes from the seemingly bottomless depths of the canvas bag. He keeps swearing he’s going to quit, embarrassed by his own shortness of breath when climbing the stairs to his own apartment, but the instant calm that comes with that first drag is still so good. Remus smokes two cigarettes on his walk back to the apartment and hopes Sirius doesn’t give him any shit for the smell.

“Hi,” he says to Sirius after he relieves himself of his things and walks back into the living area. Sirius is slumped over on the threadbare couch (getting it up four flights of stairs had been quite the production), a glass of whiskey in his hand.

Sirius makes a sound that vaguely resembles an English greeting. Remus goes to the sink to fill a pot of water and is about to light the stove when Sirius says, “They’re getting married.”

For a moment the apartment is only filled with the sound of the gas ticking on the stovetop before the fire catches and Remus says, “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Sirius replies. He sounds miserable, voice creaky with alcohol and (he would never admit it, but Remus has known him since they were eleven and Remus notices these things) half-cried tears. He stares straight ahead. His eyes trace the cracks in the drywall.

“Is that what James wanted to talk to you about?” Remus asks, rummaging through the cabinets, extracting a box of spaghetti.

“Yeah.”

“Well — ”

“Also, Lily’s pregnant.”

This gives Remus pause. He stops himself from cringing, making a bad joke, haven’t James and Lily heard of condoms. He watches Sirius take a sip of his drink and the face he pulls upon swallowing the whiskey. This, too, is familiar: Sirius’ grimace after drink, the shred of boyishness it betrays. Sirius likes sweet things, things that are easy to swallow. Remus casts about in his mind for an appropriate reaction that won’t send Sirius further into the depths of his despair and finally settles on, “Wow.”

Sirius laughs meanly. “Yeah. Wow.”

“I suppose James’ job at the bank was good timing on their part,” Remus says, stirring the pasta in the pot with a muscle memory that he’s developed after eating this exact meal nearly every night for the past year and a half. He misses the dining hall food from boarding school, something he thought he would never say after all those years. “It’s expensive to have a kid. And to have a _wedding_. Jesus Christ.”

“Jesus Christ,” Sirius echoes. He finishes the rest of his drink in a single gulp. 

“I’m happy for them, though,” Remus adds. Privately, he’s always dreamed of a fancy wedding, something grand but not gaudy, maybe on a beach in Cape Cod. Not that it’s likely at this point, he’s committed to his studies, thank you, no, there are no girls I’ve been meeting in the city, Mom. He dumps the pasta into the colander and nearly scalds himself as the boiling water splashes out of the sink. 

He sits at the folding card table that serves as their dining room and eats silently, watching Sirius brood as he pours himself another drink. Sirius thinks that Remus is oblivious to the world outside his books, but Remus knows this as well as he knows the particular cadence of Virginia Woolf’s writing: that Sirius is irrevocably in love with James Potter, even if he doesn’t quite know it or have the words to describe it. It’s almost literary, the futility of their friendship, and it hurts Remus to have watched it all from such a close angle throughout their years at school. He can always tell it’s James on the telephone just from the way Sirius’ voice shifts and smooths out in the other room, the gentleness that leaks into his tone. There have been times where Remus has almost said something, asked how much longer Sirius plans to keep this up, do you want to come out to a club with me, you could meet someone new, but he stays quiet. Sirius does not take well to the feeling of shame, and Remus does not take well to confrontation, not of others nor of his own feelings. 

They get high together when Remus is done with his pasta and Sirius, already half-drunk from the whiskey, slumps against Remus’ shoulder after only a couple hits. Sirius’ head is heavy and topped with a thick nest of black hair that Remus takes great care to avoid setting on fire. He sighs gutturally as he shifts and Sirius lies down, not minding the grime of the cold floorboards, resting his head on Remus' thigh. Sirius hums and reaches lazily for the joint. When he falls asleep a few minutes later, Remus sits very still so as to allow him to stay like that, childlike and unworried.


	2. Chapter 2

A month or so later, Sirius slams shut the dryer door at the laundromat and straightens up to find his old classmate Dorcas Meadowes staring down at him from where she is perched upon the adjacent dryer. They had banded together in school because they were both saddled with unusual, archaic names that were almost too easy to turn into homophobic monikers. The fact that Dyke-us Meadowes and Sissius Black both turned out to be accurate (if uncouth) descriptors of their identities only made them closer. 

“Hey,” she says wryly.

“Dorcas!” Sirius exclaims, leaning forward to give her a hug. “How have you been? How’s Marlene?”

“I’m fine,” calls a voice from behind him. Sirius turns to see Dorcas’ girlfriend standing behind a mountain of laundry, counting out change in her palm. “How are you, Sirius?”

“Shit, it’s a party at the laundromat,” Sirius laughs. “I’m fine, thanks.”

“We saw you from outside,” Dorcas says, swinging her big booted feet and landing on the linoleum floor with a _thwack_. “You even load laundry with a limp wrist.”

Sirius rolls his eyes.

“Hey, Sirius,” Marlene says as she sidles over to them. Through the grimy windows of the laundromat, the sunlight catches her blond hair and creates a briefly dazzling effect. Even when New York is at its dirtiest and dankest, Sirius is struck by these accidental moments of intense beauty, and feels reassured in his decision to be here regardless of everything. “Did you get anything in the mail from Lily and James?” she asks.

Sirius’ mood instantly sours. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m s’posed to be the best man, so, yeah, I’ve heard about the — the whole shebang.” He can’t bring himself to call it a wedding, but he knows that’s exactly what it is and he’s being petulant. Remus doesn’t say anything, thank god, but despite this Sirius can feel the cool judgment of his gaze when Remus mentions having gone to the tailor to get his measurements taken and Sirius pretends that he has gone temporarily deaf. 

“I think it’ll be so fun. I love weddings,” Marlene says. She slides her arms around Dorcas’ strong shoulders. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we got married?”

Dorcas grins at her. “Nah, we don’t need some paper from the government telling us how much we love each other. Besides,” she adds, turning to Sirius, “the best part of any wedding is the booze. Who cares if they’re in love?”

Sirius chuckles, inserting coins into the dryer. “Yeah, I’m gonna have to be fucking wasted for this.”

“Come on, Sirius, it’ll be fun. I promise.” Dorcas’ voice is tender. “You’ll be a great best man.”

“The _best_ best man,” Marlene adds, smiling.

The three of them go out for coffee while they wait for their laundry, and Sirius walks back home with the bag of clean clothes slung over his shoulder like Santa Claus. Remus is out and the apartment feels even colder than normal without his easy presence to provide its familiar warmth. Sirius stands for a while, just staring listlessly into an empty middle distance, before he goes to make a sandwich for himself. He rustles around and slams the refrigerator door hard just for the sake of some extra noise besides the sound of his own breathing and the blurry racket of the street below. On the calendar next to the refrigerator the wedding is marked in Remus’ neat script. Sirius sees it every morning as he makes coffee, every night as he stumbles home from work and gropes in the dark for the string to turn on the single overhead lightbulb, and yet it never fails to make the blood go still in his veins. 

Sirius can still remember the moment he first saw James standing opposite him in their shared dormitory. The sunlight had glinted off his glasses and carded through his fine dark curls as gently as fingers might have. He had smiled upon seeing Sirius enter the room, a stupidly wide grin that revealed a slight gap between his front teeth. It was the teeth that had done it, Sirius decides much later: the teeth and the tongue behind them. The awful and clever things could be conjured by that same mouth, the constant barks of laughter that accompanied Sirius’ commentary. The four of them had functioned as a group, thick as thieves and just as prone to petty crime as the phrase might suggest, but even the others at school knew that James and Sirius were in a class of their own when it came to friendship, never one without the other. Sometimes he longed for the time before he was able to put his want into words, when the things he felt for James were just a nebulous fizzing at the back of his mind. He might have been happier if he had just ignored how he felt.

But he did realize, of course, and he had continued with the friendship knowing that he would never have James the way he wanted. But he can have the parts of James that he has always held onto, the part that talks in his sleep and the part that rolls perfect joints and the part that listens to his friends talk with furrowed brows and the part that chased Sirius around the locker room with a tightly-coiled wet towel after soccer games.Sirius thinks later that night, watching the shadows of Remus’ soft footsteps under his bedroom doorframe, that he will always have this if nothing else. Sometimes it feels like enough. Maybe someone new will come through the doors at work and Sirius will feel the weight lift from his chest and Remus will stop looking at him with thinly-veiled pity. Maybe not.

***

The wedding takes place on the first warm weekend of April across the river in New Jersey at the church where James was baptized twenty years earlier. Remus and Peter smoke a joint together outside the church (Remus mutters a Hail Mary under his breath as an apology to God but mostly James’ parents) and so Remus spends the ceremony in a delightful warm haze. He and Peter walk down the aisle arm-in-arm with Alice Longbottom, their only other friend from school who’s married, followed by Sirius and Petunia, Lily’s older sister. James is fidgety, his glasses fogged up with tears even before Lily begins making her way down the aisle. Remus doesn’t realize he’s crying until a tear slides into his grinning mouth as he watches Lily walk carefully towards James, her long red hair particularly vibrant against the crisp white of her wedding gown. Peter leans into Remus and whispers into his ear, “She looks like a gorgeous red velvet cake,” and they stifle their laughter. Sirius stands slightly apart from them, his hands clasped behind his back. His dark hair is tied into a modest ponytail with a ribbon of black velvet.

Their vows are brief and as secular as possible despite the setting and the ancient priest that pronounces them husband and wife — Remus is positive that Lily paid someone off to make sure that they were not referred to as “man and wife” instead. Lily flings her arms around James’ neck as they kiss and everyone cheers and Remus feels like he is floating away, stoned as he is and overjoyed at witnessing the marriage of his dear friend to the woman he loves. Then he cuts his gaze to Sirius and sees the faint smile that does not reach his eyes, more like a bearing of teeth, and Remus is brought back to earth.

He seems to lose track of Sirius after that, or perhaps he purposely avoids him during the dinner and the speeches and the first dances, getting progressively drunker as he chats with old friends. At some point, he manages to catch Lily and James’ attention and they both hug him tightly in turn.

“Can you believe it? We’re fucking married,” Lily says to him.

“No,” Remus replies, laughing, and tosses his drink back. “I can’t believe it.”

“Well, you better believe it,” James says.

“I haven’t seen you this happy since tenth grade when you managed to get all those cherry bombs to go off at the same time in the faculty toilets,” Remus tells him.

“I think this might be my greatest prank yet,” James says, pulling Lily close to him. She rolls her eyes.

“Yeah, no one saw it coming,” she says sarcastically. 

Remus and Sirius’ paths do not cross again until later in the evening when Remus staggers into the men’s room and finds Sirius inside, blowing cigarette smoke out of the open window. His bowtie hangs limply around his neck and his jacket is flung carelessly onto the tiled floor. He looks haunted, eyes glazed over with drunkenness and the stricken sort of sorrow that has not left his face since about a week ago. Remus’ heart clenches tighter in his chest.

“You should lock the door, man,” Remus says.

Sirius shrugs. “I’m not using the toilet.”

“You look like you did in school,” Remus tells him, unzipping the fly of his rented tuxedo trousers. “When we would smoke in the bathrooms in the 600s hall.”

Sirius is generous enough to avert his eyes as Remus pisses. How many times have they found themselves in some version of this situation? Nothing was private when they lived together at school, and Remus suspects that this would continue to be true today if they did not now sleep in separate rooms. He rinses his hands and then goes over to sit next to Sirius on the windowsill, shutting off the lights as he goes. The moonlight through the window is bright enough, and it gives the room a private, conspiratorial atmosphere that also calls to mind countless scenes from their youth. “You got another one of those?” he asks.

Sirius watches Remus light the cigarette and take a drag and Remus watches Sirius watch him, his dark eyes tracing the path of the smoke as it leaves Remus’ lips. 

“Enjoying the party?” Remus asks finally.

Sirius laughs gruffly. “Yeah. Dorcas was right — the open bar is the best part of weddings.”

“Yeah, ‘cause who gives a shit about spending time with your best friend on the happiest day of his life?” The words come out meaner than Remus intends and he immediately wishes he could somehow suck them back into his mouth, but they float and fade away like rings of smoke.

Sirius glances away, closing his eyes as if in pain. Remus tries to come up with an apology but instead it comes out as, “Why are you still doing this, Sirius?”

Sirius opens his eyes but does not meet Remus’ gaze. “Because it’s the only thing I know how to do,” he says. The bone-white light from the moon casts his face in stark shadows.

After a silence, Remus says, “That can’t be true.”

Sirius finally looks at him and Remus is startled by the sincerity in his eyes as he insists, “It is.”

“There isn’t — there hasn’t been — ” Remus would have struggled with this conversation while sober and tackling it under the influence of alcohol is proving to be difficult in more ways than one and Sirius’ face is so, well, serious and Remus wishes desperately that things were different, that things were easier. He slides forward on the windowsill until his thigh is against Sirius’. Sirius flinches, then shifts slightly into the touch. Remus can feel the warmth of his body through the fabric and he is reminded of the unbearable intimacy of crowded subways, when he is crushed up against the ugly sport coat of whatever stranger happened to be standing next to him, forced into physical contact with someone whose name he would never know. Occasionally the lights fail in the subway cars and it goes black for a moment before they flicker back on and everyone goes to check their pockets to make sure they hadn’t been surreptitiously robbed in the darkness. Sometimes his eyes meet another person’s across the subway car and they share, briefly, their sense of relief when they both realizes their wallets were still there. The city allows for both constant surveillance and complete anonymity, barely ten feet of distance between apartments and total ignorance regarding the goings-on of one’s neighbors. But how could anyone expect to people to know their neighbors when they could hardly figure out the inner workings of those closest to them? Remus exhales smoke rings and Sirius reaches up to drag his finger through the ghostly grey circles.

They sit in silence for a long time, maybe too long. Sirius finishes his cigarette and nestles his head into the crook of Remus’ neck. Remus, without thinking, slides his hand into Sirius’. It’s meant to be a brotherly gesture but their cufflinks clink against each other and Sirius twists around so he’s looking at Remus from barely inches away, their fingers still entwined. His face is blotchy and something very deep down inside Remus sighs and rolls over, resigned.

“We’re not kids anymore, huh?” Remus says quietly and before he understands, Sirius grabs Remus by the jaw and kisses him hard.

Some quiet yet insistent voice in his head whispers about this being a bad idea and Remus agrees fervently, but he cannot presently think of any other way to comfort Sirius and a slightly quieter voice in his head says maybe this isn’t so bad. So he lets Sirius kiss him and after a couple moments, he kisses back.

Of course Remus has thought about doing this with Sirius. His earliest wet dreams had involved Sirius sucking him off in the back of their world history classroom. Sirius had always been beautiful and painfully obvious in everything he did, and there were times that Remus hoped he might at least share James’ place in the blazing spotlight of Sirius’ attention. Remus had alluded to this during a choice few moments of spectacular drunkenness, including once when Sirius had jokingly licked a wet stripe up his neck when they caught someone leering at them outside a club. Of course Remus never thought it would happen, and yet here he is, on the night of James Potter’s wedding with Sirius’ tongue between his teeth. He tastes like cigarettes and champagne and something else that one of the writers Remus studies might say is desperation.

Remus knows this will not end well. He knows that fucking Sirius in a church restroom in New Jersey will not pull either of them out of the malaise that has befallen them since graduation, that it will not fix the subways or clean the streets or bring back Marc Bolan or undo the years of hurt that have lived inside Sirius since they were young boys — and yet Remus puts his hands into Sirius’ long hair and holds him by the base of his skull as he kisses him.

Sirius’s breaths are harsh against Remus’ neck as Remus slides his hand up Sirius’ thigh to palm at the growing hardness at the front of his trousers. Remus wonders fleetingly if Sirius has ever done this with another man before, trying to gauge just how hung up on James he is, and he immediately feels the sickly spill of guilt in his stomach even as the blood rushes southwards towards his cock. 

“Sirius, this is not a good idea,” he says, pulling away. Sirius’ mouth is red and it hangs open slightly as he stares back at Remus, who glances away.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius says.

“Don’t be.”

“I do love you, Remus,” Sirius says. Remus tries not to flinch. “I do. It’s just.”

“I know,” he says, and he realizes it’s the truth. “It’s not the same. I love you, too, Sirius,” he adds, and this is true as well, in its own mottled and difficult way. “Sometimes I wish things were different.”

Sirius’ voice is small and stubborn, nearly childlike. “But they aren’t. They’re like this.” He lets out a long sigh and reaches to readjust himself. Remus again looks away.


End file.
